I am Zhong Qingwei, youngest daughter of Zhong li and Wu louyan. If you are not Chinese don’t be surprised by our different surnames. Children in China always keep their father’s surname, even when married and so mamma had her father’s surname, not my father’s, and I am called Zhong after my father.

I was born into a traditional Chinese family. Papa was the owner of a Shanghai Tea Trading Company. He had a fleet of ships. As you might guess we were very rich and had a stately Se wu yuan, a traditional Chinese mansion in Shanghai. The communist revolution in 1949, altered our lives, and although we were, at first, allowed to continue living in our mansion, we were divested of all our legal rights and assets and we were accountable to the Communist Party for all business and personal matters.

At first communism was popular with the people because Mao had liberated China from the war lords of foreign nations but as time went by communism lost its appeal and meaning. Even the Communist Party was losing faith in Mao and communism. Something was about to break and it did. That is where my story begins. Papa knew what was coming and already the underground anti-Communist movement had begun to enlist Christians, Buddhists and scholars to fight atheism.

Atheism was at the root of the philosophy of the Communist Party and it was this that fed and fired the Cultural Revolution, the destruction of everything personal, ancestral, familial or religious.

This is the story of our survival but also the tale of our self awareness, above all our faith in God and humanity. It is a story of discovery, risks and fortitude and a reexamination of our roots ancestral and spiritual.

My story is set against the background of the Cultural Revolution. The main events are historically accurate. I want this story to be read by millions of people in China so that the young, especially will learn the roots of communism and the suffering of the Chinese people. As you will gather I have drawn this story from many sources and memories. It represents what millions of families went through during the Cultural Revolution.